When you own a business, setting goals for you and your staff is a great way to keep everyone developing and growing. But often times we set goals, get excited for the outcome, then get distracted by other projects. So if you know you have a knack for getting wrapped up in the day-to-day of owning a business, using the SMART method when setting goals may help you with establishing and following through with your business’ goals.

S- Specific: When setting a goal, being vague is an easy way to make sure that it will not be accomplished. You want to have a clear and concise vision when it comes to developing a goal for your business that you truly want to see completed.

M- Measurable: Being able to measure the progress of the goal is important for two reasons, success and failure. If you are tracking the progress of your goal and see you are successful so far, you may feel a sense of accomplishment. On the other hand, if you see that you or your staff are not doing enough to complete your goals, then something has to be done to get you or them back on track.

A- Accountability: Having a group or individual who can be held accountable for the progress of the business goals is important because it allows for you, the owner, to reprimand or reward those who are taking positive steps toward reaching these goals. R- Realistic: Having an attainable goal is huge, especially because we are talking about business. While it might be easy to say “By the end of the year, I want to have made 2 million in profit”, but if your business usually only makes a quarter of that, you may be let down when December rolls around. So have a clear understanding of what goals are realistic, and which ones you’ll spend a lot of unnecessary energy trying to achieve.

T- Timed: Set a date that you would like to accomplish the goal by. Having a completion date will give you and your employees the drive to accomplish the goal. This also goes hand-in-hand with accountability, because if the goal is not reached by the set date, someone was not putting in the effort. In school, if you wanted to get good grades you had to put in the effort, so why should a business be any different?